Any trades are permissible, with the main restriction being that you may not trade more than 100 players per team in any single trade. Trades with unequal numbers of players (ie 3 for 2 trades) are legal at any time during the season, although you must have the proper number of players on your team before a regular season or postseason game. (Therefore, such a trade probably must be coupled with some free agent signings or cuts.) Additionally, a player who was signed as a free agent during the current season cannot be traded; nor can a player who was signed after being traded. Such a player is shown with "untradeable" next to his salary on your roster.

Cash can be included in trades as well as players and draft picks. Note that cash received via a trade will not create additional room under your budget, unless offsetting cash spent in buyouts.

To submit a new trade, use the "Make Trade" button in your team control menu. This causes an e-mail to be sent to the other team involved in the trade. When he confirms the trade (also with the "Make Trade" button), the trade is run and the first coach is notified by e-mail.

Before confirming a trade, you are shown three ratings for the trade in question: talent-only, talent/short-term finance, and talent/long-term finance. Each can range from 0 to 100, with 100 being a perfectly balanced trade and 50 being unfair by a 2-to-1 factor. Talent-only judges the trade on the merits of the players/picks being traded, short-term finance considers the financial impact for one full season, and long-term finance considers five seasons. The ratings are for your information only; you are free to disagree with its results and make trades as you see fit.

Once a week, the trades that have run are mailed out to the coaches in the league, along with player abilities and trade analyses. Any trades deemed too uneven may be reversed, and any owner who frequently makes bad trades may face fines as well.

Note: owners playing their demo seasons are not allowed to make trades. You can, however, pay in advance for the next season and receive full trading privileges. We apologize for the inconvenience, but had too many people abusing our demo season policy.

Trades for draft picks

Draft picks may only be traded in the offseason, and only for the upcoming draft. Some commissioners are willing to maintain a list of future traded draft picks, in which case the trade minus the traded pick will be run by the owners, and the commissioner will trade the pick once the offseason comes. There is risk in doing this, however.

There is a warning, however. if the owner who traded the pick is not running the team once that offseason arrives, the pick is not traded as this would be unfair to the team's new owner (whose team has been trimmed and thus needs all of his draft picks). So, any trades for future draft selections must weigh the odds that the draft pick being traded will actually be traded.

Each sport has a trade deadline. All trades must be sent in before the regular season game listed in the table below: